The Dream Palace of the Highborn
"It is in the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing."
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
West of Canterlot, beyond the Galloping mountains, beyond vast rolling plains filled with waving grass, beyond a desert painted with the pastel colors of a faded rainbow, beyond the last town and the last road and the last tree, the world comes to an end.
It ends on a high cliff overlooking the largest body of water known to any mortal race. This great ocean extends beyond the horizon, limitless and incomprehensible. The few pegasi who fly this far from the comfort of civilization say the air above it tastes alien, and the clouds that drift in from its shore mock their attempts to shape. It is a wild ocean, and cruel.
The unbroken cliffs extend to the left and right as far as the eye can see, and pegasus eyes can see quite far. The edge of the cliff is a knife that cuts the world in two. There is only one imperfection along its entire thousand-mile run.
It is a tower, and it is visible from dozens of miles away. The spire at its top appears first as travelers approach; the curve of the planet conceals the rest.
By the time travelers reach its base, the tower seems to reach the heavens. The flat earth that extends to the east and the flat ocean to the west only emphasize its unnatural height. Clouds break against its side and drift past, like bits of cotton caught on a bramble in the woods.
The tower’s walls are not perfectly regular. Three grooves, each the size of a city block, spiral up its length, lending the entire affair an organic feel that is utterly defeated by the tower’s monstrous size. At its circular base, the tower is hundreds of yards across; Celestia’s castle atop Canterlot Mountain could fit easily within its circumference. A slender but noticeable taper begins at about the height of the lowest clouds and ends miles above in a tip that was once as sharp as a needle before centuries of wind and neglect wore it down to a blunt and misshapen lump the size of a pony’s hoof.
A closer inspection of the walls reveals hairline gaps between massive blocks of granite. They are polished smooth, and even the long years alone with the wind and the ocean have done little to weather them. Salt stains the side of the tower facing the ocean a splotchy white that vaguely resembles the cloudy sky above.
The architects of the tower considered it their race’s greatest work, though not a single unicorn ever lifted a hoof in its construction. It was the seat of their power, the heart of an empire that extended no more than a dozen miles in any direction but held more wealth than the entire rest of the world combined. For a dozen centuries the White Queen ruled from the tower’s silver throne, and they believed, in their hubris, that the dream would last forever.
It did not. No unicorns remain in the Heartspire. The only souls here are ghosts.
But there are many of those.
* * *
The base of the tower is interrupted by three openings. They are not doors or gates, for they were never meant to close. The Heartspire was not intended as a defensive structure.
The first level of the tower is a vast open field. It held gardens once, filled with plants and animals from every biome in the world. Warding spells contained small patches of desert, swamp and tundra, all within a dozen feet of each other. All were beautiful, yes, but beauty was never their point.
This is power, the gardens said. We can bend nature to our will.
Little grows here now but weeds. It is dark on this level, and only plants adapted to the twilight places of the world thrive in the ruins. What little light remains leaks in from the openings and from faint flickering stars high above.
The stars once shone like miniature suns. Although they appear like pinpoints from the ground, each is a crystal globe three feet across. When they were new, they were so bright that any organic object that came within ten feet would burst into flames. One of these globes, by itself, could light an entire town at night.
Most of the globes are dead now. The few that retain a bit of their ancient magic appear ready to fail at any time.
It is an illusion. They will all live longer than the pony watching them far below.
Along the distant walls, wide ramps slowly wind their way up the tower to the levels above.
* * *
Most of the Heartspire is filled with residences. The smallest homes are near the bottom, though most of them would seem lavish by the standards of modern ponies. Higher up, after the spiraling ramps have circled the tower several times, the homes are as large as palaces, and still they grow larger, until each level of the tower can only hold one or two. But these homes are like castles, complete with their own walls and towers, built in mockery of the ponies living far from the Heartspire’s walls.
You build walls out of fear, the castles said. We build them for joy.
Almost no light naturally reaches these levels. Unlike the open fields below, there are no sunglobes to push back the darkness. Each home was expected to provide its own light, and in any case the unicorns living within them filled the tower with illusions of star-filled skies, perpetual sunsets, or whatever scene they desired. The tower had no real windows, which would have spoiled the featureless perfection of the walls.
The highest residence is virtually a city unto itself. The tower is narrower by this point, but it is still wide enough that the far side is lost in darkness. Hundreds of small outbuildings surround a central castle, and the rotted remnants of flags hang limp from its pinnacles in the still air of the tower.
Still the ramps lead higher. The Heartspire is not even half done.
* * *
The next level is as open as the first. The ramps end on a smooth plane of stone that stretches the entire width of the tower. Hundreds of yards above, a vaulted ceiling carved with images of stars and galaxies stares down at the emptiness.
In the center of this empty field rises a pedestal dozens of feet high. Stairs inlaid with every imaginable precious stone and metal lead up its side to a top just a few feet across.
There was a throne here once. It was crafted from silver and platinum, with a red velvet cushion said to be softer than the very clouds. During the Heartspire’s long reign, ninety-seven mares styling themselves the White Queen sat here and ruled the only part of the world that mattered.
At the top of the pedestal there is a twisted mass of ruined metal. Fragments weighing hundreds of pounds lie scattered across the floor for dozens of yards. The grey stone all around is riven with cracks and fissures.
In the center, where the throne once rested, a silver scimitar has broken the pedestal and stands there embedded. A thin layer of frost has accumulated along the blade despite the constant stale warmth of the Heartspire. Otherwise it is perfect, undulled and unmarred by time.
History records precisely one visit by Luna and Celestia to the Heartspire.
* * *
To reach the higher levels of the tower, one must take a bit of a detour. There are no ramps leading up from the throne room. Only unicorns capable of teleporting can go any higher.
The walls are noticeably closer now, dozens instead of hundreds of yards apart. Unicorns who teleported directly to this level from the ground felt their ears pop, and sometimes they grew breathless and faint if they moved too quickly. It was a small price to pay for being closer to the stars.
The level has the feel of a ritual space. Marble basins filled with dust line the walls, and the stones are filled with elaborate carvings. Legions of ponies march in relief across the walls; earth ponies haul stone blocks across a featureless field broken only by the image of a low, incomplete tower. Unicorns stand among them, passing out food and drink, and using their magic to aid the earth ponies in placing the blocks.
* * *
The images are different on the next level.
The earth ponies are smaller, their features crude and animalistic. The sculptor has not bothered to give them cutie marks.
The unicorns no longer stand among them. They oversee them from raised platforms. Their features are refined and detailed, with complex armor and cutie marks. The sculptor has carved individual strands of hair in their manes.
The tower in the distance is higher.
* * *
There are no earth ponies on the next level. Heroic unicorns march across the walls, far larger than the real ponies who once stood here. Beneath their hooves, fading away into the background, the sculptor has etched what may be a sea of backs and manes and tails, toiling in obscurity. They bear up their highborn lords.
In the distance, the Heartspire stands tall and complete. The sculptor has carved rays like the sun's shining from its peak.
Part of the wall is damaged. Through a small gap barely larger than a pony’s head, the world stretches away to the distant, curved horizon. Clouds drift below the impromptu window.
For the first time, a scent other than dirt and stone fills the air. It drifts in from the opening.
It is ash.
* * *
The highest level is largely missing.
Only a few square yards of the floor remain. Some tremendous, violent force has opened the room to the sky, and half the walls are simply gone. The ceiling and spire above -- hundreds of tons of granite-- sway in time with the wind. Only the tower’s residual magic keeps the entire affair from collapsing.
A stone altar slumps in the center of the room. It has melted like a candle left too near a fire, and rivulets of solid rock flow across the floor. Its black, charred surface is speckled with bright points where crystals formed when minerals in the stone began to fuse.
The surviving walls are blackened, but they still tell a story. Rows of unicorns bear earth ponies in the air above them, carrying them up spiraling ramps, higher and higher, past gardens and homes and a throne and basins flowing with water. Higher and higher the unicorns bear their captives, until they reach a room with a stone altar.
The rest of the story is lost, along with the walls in which it was carved. Only the Heartspire’s ghosts know the rest.
Along with Celestia and Luna, who visited the Heartspire but once.
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I'm having Dark Tower flashbacks.
Judging by how the unicorns perceived the earth ponies in their sculpted images, I can only imagine what that altar was meant for.
My guess: they (the unicorn rulers) sacrificed ponies or something, and Celestia and Luna smote them for it. A pretty disastrous blow too from the sounds of it.
The Moral of the Story : Don't (censor) with Celestia and Luna's ponies.
Damn, this is impressive. You're getting much better with these "experiments" of yours. I eagerly await the next installment.
Kali Ma!Grogar!As I reached this line, For The New Lunar Republic started playing.
This is even more chilling than the last one. The stories you aren't telling us are as intriguing as what you do.
Pegasi: Massive cloud fortress.
Unicorns: Enormous spire palace, still powered by ancient magicks.
The Earth ponies' massive abandoned structure must be... Earth itself!
Addendum: Oh wow, this first showed up in Ponemurdered? I was surprised when this showed up there!
Definitely a different feel to this one. This comes a little bit closer than the first chapter to actually telling a story. There is clearly an implied set of events here, whereas it was left a bit more vague as to what happened to Derecho.
But both chapters are extremely effective at showcasing a specific culture, displaying their priorities and their attitudes. It's interesting to note that both the pegasus and unicorn cultures displayed here were highly insular and self-centered, but in dramatically different ways. All the opulence and splendor, all the hubris. The bit about the wall-carvings steadily de-humanizing (de-ponifying?) the earth ponies was especially chilling.
Now, in the first chapter, the only modern ponies whose view of the fortress was referenced were earth ponies. And in this chapter, the only modern ponies mentioned are pegasi. I wonder if that's just a coincidence of convenience, or if you're going to complete the cycle in the next chapter by making whatever bastion the earth ponies had only visited by unicorns?
2883349 Erotic massage.
So very nice:
I love reading pieces like this aloud in a hushed John Hurt sort of voice.
One brief typo: "Hundreds of small outbuilding surround a central castle," it says at one point. Unless "outbuilding" is wunna them pesky collective nouns...
Mike
Again, beautiful writing. The description of the Heartspire is full of haunting grandeur. It gave me the idea that the White Queens were the traditional movers of the Sun and the Moon, before Celestia and Luna came onto the scene... and that they continued the sacrifices, out of tradition and vanity, until the Princesses visited them. Once.
Chilling! Tower of Babel anyone? Or the (most probably false) tales about the Egyptian pyramids, where the pharaohs had the workers buried to keep their secrets?
I like this chapter even better then the first one. And I loved that one already!
Nicely drawn. These would make excellent settings for a hypothetical pony-related RPG. Cant wait to see the conclusion of the triptych; unless, that is, you have a fourth in mind beyond that for the alicorns.
Absolutely brilliant!
I can almost see the place -- the description is so vivid. And the implications of the altar, and the, likewise implied, fury of the two sisters are shudder-worthy.
5/5 stars. Would read again.
Woah, that's awesome.
I gotta say though, Celestia and Luna are terrible guests, everywhere they visit just once or twice turns into a ghost town.
Dayum, that's pretty dark.
Friggin' awesome, though!
2884104
That's pretty much exactly what I envisioned as well. I didn't make the "moving the sun and moon" part explicit, but I was definitely thinking it :)
2884276
I plan to stop with earth ponies. My goal is to see if I can manage to tell a story with no characters and no actions, only scenery.
Also, I started reading Contraptionology last night. I don't know why I waited so long.
2886658
Thanks for reading! I saw your fave and squee'd a little inside.
2886658
I kinda had the idea that the unicorns made Celestia and Luna. Created from the blood of the ponies they now rule, they cast down those that would sacrifice others for power.
Pointless dramatics aside, I can see unicorns trying to make one or two of themselves immortal and it would be an interesting twist to have the attempt create Celestia and Luna.
Well, some good came of "Ponemurdered."
I'm thrilled to have provided the inspiration, though you've really done the concept justice far beyond what my hastily-dreamed-up concept merited. I found the imagery of the undulled sword still embedded in the ancient, broken throne absolutely delightful: it is the sort of densely meaningful visual that could define an epic, or about which one could build an entire world.
Here's the really great thing about this: I'm pretty sure I came up with the idea of pony sacrifice on a ritual altar after reading "In the Garden of Good and Evil" ... by Cold in Gardez. And so the cycle continues ...
2884276
Dude! I was thinking the exact same thing!
2884276
Well, I'm not saying I want a chapter about seaponies, but c'mon: seaponies!
2890391
A harder task, considering that there's been no canonical cartoons and one semi-canonical book featuring their culture. Of course, er, probably once you get beyond "ponies living underwater" there's not a lot of details that couldn't be fudged.
This is, of course, assuming you're sticking entirely with G4.
(...shoo-be-doo, shoo-shoo-be-doo...)
Oh my.
2888036
Yeah, that's a great visual.
I love the spartan economy of this line.
3001385
I second that. It is a wonderfully dire line.
Just as I started reading this, it occurred to me: this is more a story I expect from the Descendant than one I expect from you. It looks like a story about places, after all, and that is more the Descendant's style then most. His writing is a bit . . . arty, let's say, since "pretentious" is definitely far too pejorative . . . and writing about places as opposed to people or events is also generally arty, so they go well together.
And so, I have seen him writing about places. I know what that looks like. From you, I don't quite know what to expect. But I look forward to finding out. I know you will not disappoint.
I am Ozymandius, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Symbolism!
This makes me think of The Song of Syhlex.
I'm sorry, but I don't think I'll be able to stop thinking of the Descendant while I read this. Rude, I know, but frankly I spend a lot of my time while reading thinking about other stories by other authors. It's just that you're supposed to be one of the other authors, rather than the victim.
I should like to see these reliefs, to see what precisely they show of racial relations circa the construction of the tower (or circa the carving of the reliefs, probably). That description does not sound like a master/slave relationship, or even a lord/peasant relationship, though surely there were parts of history when the unicorns would not have associated with earth ponies in any more egalitarian manner.
Now, see, this is something I'm going to have to think about. Though the thematic significance is clear, from a Watsonian perspective I must ask: why did attitudes change so sharply between the carving of reliefs only one level apart? Did it take such a long time to build each level? Were the reliefs on this level carved well after the level was built? Did things just change that quickly? None seem to stand unsupported. And so, I must seek a more complex explanation.
I'm going with theory #2. When the tower was built, the lower of these two levels was used for whatever rituals the unicorns may have been performing. The upper was used for either something that would not have much effect on its construction, or was left empty altogether for future expansion. As the tower continued to go up, racial relations altered, until the reliefs on the lower level were no longer suitable for a unicorn ritual space (probably there used to be stairs up from the throne room, so earth ponies could in theory attend the rituals, but they were removed when attitudes started to change, so by this point it was a specifically unicorn ritual space). So they converted the upper level into a replacement befitting the status quo at the time.
Is it strange that I stopped to theorize because I wanted to be wrong? I expected there would be a third level (everything always comes in threes) and yet I chose to theorize based on only the information I had before me with certainty, because I wanted to have a guess that did not take the third level into account when I reached it.
And yet, while the probability of two ritual space upgrades a priori is less than that of one, in the absence of some reason to keep needing periodic upgrades (or in the absence of a theory at all about the reason), and while it does not seem like the second relief would ever become objectionably fair to the earth ponies, the fact that this relief shows the Heartspire complete does rather raise the posterior probability that the reliefs were not all carved as their corresponding levels were being built. So, all in all, I seem to have done better than I was planning for. Whoops.
And I still cannot stop thinking of the Descendant.
I guess the lesson we can take from this is:
Don't mess with black magic, or the Princesses will bust yo' flank.
I'm listening to "Sundown" by Bill Gould and Jared Blum, and it's the perfect song for this. Dark, spooky, post- apocalyptic feel. And all instrumental, not a single lyric.
It fits this like a hand in a glove.
Damned unicorns and their pagan sacrifice!
THAT IS WHY GOD DEMANDED THAT THEY BE SLAUGHTERED DOWN THE LAST CHILD AND... oh wait... this isn't the book of Joshua!
2890485 What if you turned that annoying song on its head by having the "shoo-be-doos" be the only part of the original lyrics that stood the test of time and the original lyrics to the catchy pop tune be in fact about pony sacrifice or something?
Kind of like how "Ring around the Rosies" has a VERY dark real meaning.
This was super-impressive, and very entertaining. I love how you tell a story without any dialogue, or characters. And I must say, the mere concept of a tower so colossal is awe-some in and of itself.
"The only souls here are ghosts.
But there are many of those."
That line...
Cured my cancer...
Are you a fan of H. P. Lovecraft -- and most specifically, have you ever read At the Mountains of Madness? (If you are, I think you know why I asked this question).
Ok, I'm totally using this in my next dnd session. It's not even a pony campaign, the scenery is just too good to NOT use. I only hope my party doesn't just knock the whole structure over..... :l
4388616 If only you knew how much I approved right now....
Dear freaking lord. That was gorgeous. It looks like a story about a place, but its really a history of a people. Fantastic.
Was the quote at the start added recently? I don't remember it from the last time I read this.
3945097
It scans more like "the Doom That Came to Sarnath". With some grace-notes from Jack Vance, whom I'm always promising I'll read more of, and never get around to actually reading...
I had a feeling this was inspired by Calvino.
This is by far my favorite chapter. The descriptions were so vivid, I could visualize every detail of the Heartspire! And those allegories? Oh, they were hauntingly beautiful! Great work as always, CiG!
Hauntingly telling. Descriptive yet vague.
I like this.
What happened to Hearthspire reminds me of Charn in the Magician's nephew: both were prosperous kingdoms originally founded and ruled by kind benevolent people but after a few generations grew increasingly proud, conceited, and even cruel to where they were dabbling in things that were best left alone ultimately bring the downfall of not only themselves but their own civilizations or in the case of Charm all life on their world.
I've been meaning to put some words down in this for a while, seeing as I first read this story all the way back in 2015, Having given it more consideration and looking back over it again, though I can (and will) adorn this with lavish praise, my critique can be summarize as such:
This story is the Midnight Cowboy of scenery porn.
Your prose is nothing short of elegant; its atmospheric and as thick as the humidity in Florida, but without choking the reader with purple. It's use of words is exemplary, and manages to say as much as it needs to establish what the setting looks like, but with enough open to interpretation that the reader can paint their own picture of the world, further immersing them in the environment, and it manages to do this with near nary more than two thousands words per chapter: an exercise of brevity in it's finest forms (and a skill I have yet to master... or implement...)
This chapter, "The Dream Palace of the Highborn," is my favorite of the lot, as it goes beyond simply world building and blossoms into a narrative; it tells a story of the palace's rise, prominence, and abandonment almost purely through the remains, What cannot be conveyed through illustration is artfully delivered with succinct punches that brilliantly use the concise wording to further darken the foreboding tone without breaking the pace, resulting the perfect collaboration of using both showing and telling techniques. And those last two lines?
Fucking genius.
Would this anthology happen to take inspiration from Jorge Borges at all? Even if it doesn't, I have something that was. To beat Relevant Heavy Metal to the punch that may never come, yet I still fear might, along with his butt rock, allow me to share a number I think of in tandem with this work of art.
Allow me to present, 'The Circular Ruins' by At The Gates.
- Christian 'Dream Me' Harisay
I love the description of this tower from a distant time where Earth Ponies were just slaves.
I wrote an analysis piece about The Dream Palace of the Highborn in my blog, because I really, really love this thing and wanted to explore why it works so well.
Thank you for writing this, and for inspiring others to write.
2883317
I had Tattered Spire flashbacks.
Tower of Babel
It’s obviously not but without the MLP connection that’s what I would’ve have matched this with.
This story's gonna be told in reverse-chronological order, isn't it?